By end of year, world's megaclouds will all be serving up CF, says Pivotal CEO Maritz

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VMware has finally launched Cloud Foundry on its vCloud Hybrid Service cloud alongside a broader partnership with big daddy EMC.

The virtualization company's chief executive Pat Gelsinger said on Tuesday at EMC World in Las Vegas that Cloud Foundry will soon be available on top of the company's vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) cloud.

Cloud Foundry is a platform-as-a-service developed by VMware-spinoff Pivotal that has some open source components, including a standalone PaaS project.

It competes with similar technologies such as Red Hat's "OpenShift" PaaS, along with the Rackspace-backed OpenStack Solum and, to a lesser extent, Apprenda's specialist .NET and Java service.

What separates Cloud Foundry from its rivals is the amount of enthusiasm with which the community has adopted it, with companies like IBM, HP, SAP, and others joining a "Foundation" to help spur the open source aspects of the project.

By the end of the year, Pivotal expects Cloud Foundry to be available on many more clouds beyond VMware.

"We believe by the end of this year ... the most important clouds in the world ... will be offering Cloud Foundry," said Pivotal chief Paul Maritz in a keynote speech on Tuesday.

By our count, that means Cloud Foundry should rise up on Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, and – at a push – Rackspace and Joyent by the end of the year.

Maritz also said that Cloud Foundry has been a key ingredient in a software-as-a-service product called "EMC Supplier Exchange" from the company's Information Intelligence Group.

This SaaS product uses EMC Documentum and Cloud Foundry to give energy and engineering companies a way to share information on projects for liability and compliance purposes. ®